Telecommunications networks may provide a number of services, such as plain old telephone service (“POTS”), digital subscriber line (“DSL”), and cable. Maintenance of the telecommunications network generally involves the assignment of an appropriate technician to each outstanding job such that all of the outstanding jobs are timely filled. When a technician finishes one job and is ready to be dispatched to another job, the technician may receive next job information. The next job information may include, for example, the location of the next job and the type of work to be done in the next job. The technician may receive the next job information via a portable computing device, such as a laptop computer, which enables the technician to receive the job information out in the field without having to return to a base station.
A sufficient number of technicians are typically hired to comfortably fill an estimated number of jobs. There may be times, however, when the availability of technicians is greater than the availability of jobs for which the available technicians are qualified. In such a case, instead of receiving next job information on the portable computing device when the technician is ready to be dispatched to another job, the technician will receive a No Jobs Available (“NJA”) message. The NJA message may be transmitted to the technician from a load balance personal computer (“PC”) responsible for dispatching technicians to jobs.
The amount of unproductive time between the technician receiving a NJA message and being dispatched to the next job is known as Lost Productive Time (“LPT”). LPT may be a significant expense for entities involved in scheduling and dispatching technicians or other personnel. As such, the ability to track LPT may prove valuable for supervisors and managers responsible for dispatching the technicians.
LPT may conventionally be estimated by manually retrieving a technician's work list (i.e., a list containing the time periods in which the technician was dispatched to jobs) and calculating the amount of time between jobs on the work list. The work list, however, generally provides no information regarding whether or when the technician received a NJA message. Thus, no way existed to associate the amount of time between jobs with the NJA message to more precisely determine the LPT.